Warring Self

Akashi. Akashi. Wake up. It's 7 am.  Akashi. Akashi. WAKE UP NOW  you little bastard you can't fight the clock!  Wake up,wake up, wake up. Thank you for using Alarming Language the worlds foremost omni-lingual smart clocks.  Your ad and language preferences are out of date. Your ad and language preferences are... 22 years out of date. Update now to save 30% on the new model ALN-50X.

Akashi swiftly rises from his bed. "Enough". He grabs it by the black coated power signal cord and lashes it  into a sturdy dresser repeatedly until no more sound comes from it. "That's better". He is still more drunk than hungover from the n-i-g-h-t before. The long night before. Without a starting point able to remembered.

His sense of relief from anger exercised flees as swiftly as it arrived. He's had the alarm clock since he was a child. It was old tech in these times, an otherwise precious thing to him. But no man has ever really loved an alarm clock.

 The new models are able to enter your dreams to deliver what are officially declared to be good dreams and even better advertisements. He knew he'd be having a hard time finding a replacement that wasn't worse. Akashi was not an updater.  Akashi was a devout downgrader when he knew how to be ,but in this age it was getting more and more complex to do so.

Things only gets worse with updates that is a truth he knows and lives and so do people he figures. It's how it went for the man himself. He's not really curious about the people at all. He suspects he knows enough. His life and his work is all their aftermath.

He knows he is just going to have to buy another one and he hates to buy new things. Hearing his name spoken from billboards and the sidewalk itself with the same ultimate message. "The latest greatest in tech  is sure to bring someone happiness Akashi!"  He's imagining the words, or remembering them. Perhaps it was a conversation he had emboldened by drink to speak to the worlds background.  So emboldened now he has words to it. "Perhaps to the one who sells it to me for a little while, but not I".

He found where he was going  to be such an unholy site he  was hardly able to countenance taking an intentional step on the the pilgrimage itself.

As he looks over the broken mess of parts and  thinks about the journey into the city to buy a new alarm clock he concludes not to even bother. "There is always a string attached to everyone and everything there is these days. Was it always this way?"  He scoffs with that thought. He's mocking and scorning himself as much as he is anything he knows. Anything he knows goes through himself. "Probably just a bad filter"

He makes his morning tea in haste splashing it and burning his hand. He hardly pauses in response  from it, as if he dropped a crumb. He merely rubs his hand against the new material mug which stops the pain, but also takes advantage of the moment to pitch to him extended mug warranty and accident forgiveness insurance. Having lost the taste for tea on account of the mug who proves as much of a dealer as a healer he pours it down the drain and goes to work in a pleasant corner of his land. Far removed from crowds of people. Too full of their things instead.

Akashi works at a large scrap yard. Ask anyone, he's a scrapper. Ask Akashi, he'll tell you he's a divorce lawyer. He deals in veritable mountains of people work which he sorts from his innumerable clients. The remnants of the failed relationships between mankind and their old or broken things that they replace with newer things hoping to repair themselves.  Not an entirely useless endeavor. It makes more mountains.

This day is a holiday. Akashi gladly works these. He is receiving his bonus pay and has his workplace to himself, well the only human,  besides the bots decorating the world like wallflowers and that's exactly how he thought of them. How anyone did. The very idea of them being anything otherwise was long lost when they ceased being excitingly new.

  If work could be nice, this is twice as nice.  Today he's even able to drink on the job openly w/o any trouble and so he does.

As Akashi sits in the heart of his great machine sorting his out of love clients assets by type and value he makes out a twisted human leg sticking out as if it were a tree root crawling out from the edge of a cliff.

Fearfully he stops moving the mountain before him. He hides his drink in his jacket not wanting blame.  He yells out. "Are you okay?" "What are you even doing here, you're not supposed to be here, are you okay?"  There is no response.  "Hold still,  don't move, don't move an inch, I'm coming".

As he approaches the sight becomes clearer. False flesh attached to metal and circuitry. He loses his concern along with all worry  and from his jacket pocket he retakes to his drink and spits on the ground.

 It's not a human. "It looks like a hump bot, a real old one". His scoffing turns to interest, "I wonder just how old it is". He puts on a pair of glasses. It shows him the information concerning it as if it were the world before him.  A great tool and an even greater headache if worn too long.

  "So it's a HM02. A Help Mate, model two. 150 yrs old".  With new getting worse, old becomes attractive by contrast. He's interested enough from that alone. He looks to its face,  " Like the inside of a coke can was used to catch oil and cockroach, something of a butter face aren't you?"

He moves debris. A sight catches his eyes and doesn't let go until it steals its moments, the other side of the face. He regains himself,  continues to asses it. "Solar power or?  Is this tech compatible with the power signal?"

  It's on standby mode, whatever clockwork in its head is still working after all this time. It seems to stare into him as if it is desperate to ask or say something but there is no movement.

"Seems to want something from me.... nah. I get this way with the drink. Just a pretty face, just another dead relationship met up with time both doing their disgrace to a dead artisan". 

He finishes his drink standing by it as if it comforts him in some way. Like a warm bonfire. His lips grow looser and looser with his sorrow in each swig.  Is he talking to himself? He's looking at it as if he is.  Is he speaking to it w/o giving it an order?

 " You know robot means slave. Every day that I go on living I feel as if I'm being made a slave or forced into wanting to be the master of something else. Of course I am, why wouldn't I be? What is life but a great big force?  I guess I'd rather be a master than a slave. Tell me robot, what would you choose? Master or slave? Right, you're broke. Even if you weren't you'd have nothing to say. See all the bots walking around? They don't have anything to say either and they are new. They work just fine. Tell me robot, what do you think of me being your master? Nothing but silence again? Do you want me to do all of your thinking for you is that it? You really are a slave then aren't you, you hunk of junk. You may as well be my slave."

 "You're appealing to me in a way coke cans. You're the oldest robot I've ever seen. You know things are often better that way, I guess it would be true for slaves too wouldn't it robot? Even my mug.... doubt I'd be able to find better to buy in your kind hump bot"

He looks around nervously ensuring no one is there to have overhead him. To speak to  them in the first place without a command to go away and do something so you don't have to is considered rather out there.  They aren't exciting, they aren't new.  He loads it up to take home, carefully covering it.